In scientific circles, the famous map of Gerard Mercator, where he allegedly first showed Hyperborea in the North Pole region, has made and continues to excite the minds of researchers to this day. I would like to dwell on this issue in more detail.
History of the Mercator map
1569 - Mercator published a map of the world, which was made on 18 sheets, in the manufacture of which a completely new way of depicting a grid of parallels and meridians was used, which was later called the Mercator projection. When drawing up the map, he took into account the main reason leading to its distortion - this is the impossibility of depicting the surface of the Earth on a plane absolutely precisely because of its sphericity. Therefore, it is believed that the outlines of continents and oceans are presented with the least distortion on Mercator's maps.
Then he began work on the Atlas, or Cartographic Consideration of the Creation of the World and the Type of Creation, to which maps were attached. Since that time, the word "atlas" has finally become a household name for any collection of maps. The first two parts of the Atlas were published during Mercator's lifetime, while the third, with 36 maps of the British Isles, was published after the death of Mercator by his son Rudolph in 1595. Gerard Mercator died on December 2, 1594 in Duisburg.
It was this card, published by his son, that became the very famous Mercator card. More precisely, there were two of them: one belongs to Gerard Mercator himself, compiled by him back in 1554, and the second, more detailed, was published by his son in 1595, the authorship of which he did not claim. What are its features, why has it attracted the attention of scientists and especially our modern researchers?
What is remarkable about the map
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In fact, the map strikes with its unusual image of the northern hemisphere of our planet for those times. Mercator's map is like a look at the Earth from the side of the North Star to the point of the North Pole. Moreover, there is a feeling that it was created on the basis of some kind of aerial photograph taken from space, from an orbital station. The similarities are simply amazing. Surprising is the strait between Asia and America, discovered, as you know, only in 1648 by the Russian Cossack Semyon Dezhnev, and it was mapped much later - in 1732, after which Western Europe learned about it. How then could he get on the Mercator map, our contemporaries ask.
Moreover, on the map, you can find a number of other geographical objects, the existence of which Europeans in the XVI century simply could not know. Among them: the mouth of the Yenisei, the Yukon River in Alaska, Hudson Bay, detailed outlines of Novaya Zemlya, etc. The amazing coincidence of the parallels and meridians drawn with the coordinates of modern maps is striking. How could medieval cartographers know about this? And most of the scientists make an unambiguous conclusion - in the hands of Mercator were some ancient cards unknown to his contemporaries. Which, of course, cannot be completely ruled out.
What is shown on the map
According to the unanimous opinion of modern researchers, primarily the author of many books on revealing the secrets of the Russian people and an outstanding scientist, now late V. N. Demina, the legendary and mysterious Hyperborea or Arctida is depicted in the center of the Mercator map. As can be seen from the map, the depicted polar continent is represented by four large islands separated from each other by deep rivers or channels and located around the pole, in the place of which the supposedly high Mount Meru is depicted - "the universal mountain of the ancestors of Indo-European peoples."
This is where the fun begins. It is completely unclear why the respected researchers, and there are already several dozen of them who are engaged in the Hyperborean topic, decided that it was Hyperborea that was depicted on the map. But Mercator does not have a word about this, although, as you can see, there are explanatory inscriptions or so-called legends on the drawing. The text says: "The ocean between these islands bursts in four straits, along which it constantly rushes to the North Pole and there is absorbed in the womb of the earth …"
The island, "facing" Greenland, is said to be "the best and healthiest in the entire North." Although nothing is said about the island "facing" Europe, the inhabitants are reported to be "pygmies, about 4 feet tall, like those in Greenland called the Skrelingers."
Marco Polo
On the image of the third island, Mercator, referring to the famous traveler Marco Polo (according to the text of Mark Pavlos of Venice), put the inscription: “In the northern regions, as narrated by Mark Pavlos of Venice, there are the Bargu Islands, which stretch so far to Aquilon (i.e. north: Aquilon is an analogue of Boreus. - Ed. note) that the Arctic pole there seems to be shifted to the south."
But Marco Polo (1254-1324) in his "Book on the diversity of the world" only mentions a northern country called Bargu, according to historians, located in Siberia, between the Irtysh and Yenisei, which "stretches for 40 days", to the "sea -ocean, in the same place are the mountains where pilgrim falcons build their nests”(Book on the diversity of the world, LXXI). In our opinion, they are also mistaken, here we are talking about the country that the ancient Scandinavians in their sagas called Biarmia.
In the second half of the 13th century, the great Venetian traveled from Europe to China for 24 years and returned from there by sea. He did not make any maps, but the huge amount of geographical information presented in this book allowed the English historian Henry Julius in 1875 to print a map "The World According to Marco Polo", where in the east of Russia he located the country of Bargu, etymologically very similar to Borea and Biarmia.
How was it created? Where does this knowledge come from Mercator?
Let's get back to the Mercator map. Before convincing that Mercator really depicted the disappeared polar continent called Hyperborea, I wanted to unbiased and objectively understand the essence of this issue.
Mercator. Map of the Arctic 1595
Let's try to answer the main question: where did Mercator get his geographic knowledge about the polar North, could some unknown ancient maps that have not come down to us have fallen into his hands?
In the middle of the 16th century, the British undertook a series of sea voyages to the North in order to find a northeastern route to China and other Asian countries. But their attempts were unsuccessful. One of them, Richard Chancelor, happened to be at the mouth of the Northern Dvina.
Having failed, the British were forced to turn to the well-known European cartographer Gerard Mercator for help, probably believing that they could not find a better expert on the North. Surely, they had already got acquainted with the map of the Northern Hemisphere with the image of the so-called Hyperborea, published by him for the first time in 1554.
In response, the well-known cartographer wrote a letter to Oxford in June 1580, in which he said that he was very sorry for the lost time, that he could not provide timely advice to English sailors. As can be seen from the contents of the letter, Mercator did not have a deep understanding of the geography of the polar seas and coastline at that time. On the map of 1595, published immediately after his death, it can be concluded that detailed geographical knowledge about the North will appear in him later, before his death. And by that time, Mercator's knowledge was limited to Pliny the Elder, some other writers and information from "some roughly drawn maps," which he himself says in a letter to the English Lord Richard Hackluyt.
So, the entire stock of knowledge about the polar regions at Mercator is limited to information about some huge bay and Cape Tabin, first mentioned by Pliny, as well as about the islands of Vaigach and Novaya Zemlya, which, according to most historians, became widely known to Western Europeans thanks to (?) travels of the same Englishmen, carried out since 1553. This unfair statement existed for several centuries. Moreover, it was believed that the British were the first to open the Northern Sea Route through Scandinavia to Asia. Although this is far from the case.
Mercator, in his own words, served as a source of knowledge about the North, besides Pliny, some other writers and "roughly drawn" maps. What are these writers? Mercator himself mentions one of them in a letter to Oxford: “Once a friend of mine from Antwerp gave me the 'Journey' of Jacob Knoyen from Gertogenbosch throughout Asia, Africa and the northern countries, having received it from another person; I used it and gave it back; many years later I again asked my friend for it, but he could not remember from whom he took it."
A friend from Antwerp was, of course, the geographer-scientist Abraham Ortelius, who helped Mercator in the selection of material for making maps. And the traveler Jacob Knoyen was the author of the composition "Belga Linguica", which also did not reach us and disappeared. In it, the writer included the earliest account of the voyage of an Oxford priest. The work of Knoyen Mercator, namely, the cartographer mentions him in a letter, was later used in the compilation of those very famous maps of 1554 and 1595.
But even earlier, another, but less well-known cartographer, Johan Ruysch, had information about the work of a traveling monk entitled "A Happy Discovery Voluntarily Made from 54 Degrees to the Pole." Perhaps the original of this work still existed at that time. 1508 - on his world map near the North Pole, he made an inscription with the following content:
“In the book“De inventione fortunata”(“Happy discovery”) you can read that at the North Pole rises a high cliff of magnetic stone, with a circumference of 33 German miles. It is washed by a flowing suction sea, from which water there, as from a vessel, pours down through the holes. There are 4 islands around, of which 2 are inhabited. Desert vast highlands rise around these islands for 24 days, and there are no human dwellings on them."
On the same map, off the northern shores of Greenland, there is a second inscription or legend: "The suction sea begins here, the ship's compass is already unreliable, and ships that have iron in them cannot turn back."
Mercator, through Jacob Knoyen, knew the composition "The Happy Discovery" well and used it to draw up a map of 1554, and later his son - in 1595. Mercator showed the North Pole in the form of a rock surrounded by the sea, among which there were 4 large and 19 small islands …
Mercator Map 1538, depicting two polar regions
Moreover, in addition to Knoyen, another famous scientist, the French mathematician, astronomer and geographer Orontius Finey, knew well about the Polar continent. His 1532 map depicts Antarctica in the Southern Hemisphere, and near the North Pole - the mythical islands, called by modern researchers Hyperborea, with a mountain at the North Pole.
As can be seen from the figure, the description and image of the imaginary Hyperborea are exactly the same for all writers and cartographers - for Jacob Knoyen, Orontius Finey and Mercator. Later, a similar image of the Polar Archipelago will appear in a contemporary of Mercator and his imitator, the English mathematician and astrologer John Dee.
John Dee was also fond of mapping, and, naturally, his attention was drawn to the work of Mercator. When, in 1577, he turned to the famous cartographer with a request to inform him where he got the data on the North Pole region, he did not hesitate in answering.
From the letter of Mercator, it became known that in the depiction of the North Pole, he relied on two sources: the essay "The Happy Discovery" by a Franciscan priest and the medieval work "The Acts of King Arthur". Here they meant, according to the researchers, the well-known early medieval work of Bishop Galfrid of Montmune entitled “The History of the Britons”, which examined the legends of King Arthur. At the same time, with both works, says Mercator further in a letter, he got acquainted (attention!) Not directly, but from the works of Jacob Knoyen, which did not reach us, that is, through second hand.
Dear reader, we hope that now he himself will draw a conclusion what "ancient maps and compositions" the famous cartographer used in his works, which served as sources for Mercator to depict the mythical Hyperborea and Mount Meru, and then as the basis for the fantastic conjectures of modern fiction writers.
From the work of Jacob Knoyen, Mercator learned that the traveler monk had an astrolabe with him, with the help of which he determined the latitude of the places he visited, in particular the islands off the Norwegian coast. And, obviously, the traveler presented information about the Far North on the basis of rumors widespread at that time about unknown islands (for example, the same island of Tula by ancient writers) and about the "magnetic mountain" at the North Pole.
The legend of the magnetic mountain originated in ancient times. Pliny and Ptolemy have reports about it. The Europeans, who paid attention to the property of the magnetized needle to turn in the same northern direction, could have conjectures and even legends about an unknown magnetic mountain located somewhere in the North. The same, only in relation to the South Pole, could be assumed by the inhabitants or travelers of the Southern Hemisphere.
Initially, as you can see, it was believed that the magnetic mountain is "harmless", which is reflected in folk poetry. However, soon the mythical mountain turned into one of the most terrible dangers facing the navigators, and they began to attribute the death of many ships to it. But no one could find her.
Since it was not possible to find it in the known waters up to Greenland and Svalbard (Spitsbergen), the imaginary location of the mythical mountain gradually moved further and further north. Then they began to assume that the magnetic mountain is generally located at the North Pole, and later they began to attribute magnetic properties even to the Pole Star itself.
This idea of a magnetic mountain has been preserved for several centuries and was reflected in the maps of Gerard Mercator and, as we can see, in other cartographers of the late Middle Ages. By the way, pay attention to the map of Mercator, and you will find not even one, but two mountains.
This is explained by the cartographer himself in a letter to his English colleagues from Oxford:
“I have learned from reliable magnetic observations that the magnetic pole is not very far beyond Tabin. There are many rocks around this pole and around Tabin, and swimming there is very difficult and dangerous. The magnet has a different pole than the world, and the whole world is related to it: the closer they come to it, the more the compass needle, penetrated by the needle of the magnet, deviates from north to west or east, respectively, to the east or west of the meridian, which passes through both the magnetic pole and the pole of the world. This deviation is surprising and can mislead many sailors, unless they are aware of this fickle magnet."
We must agree with Mercator that the magnetic property of the polar sea peak could mislead not only many navigators, but, it turns out, our modern inquisitive researchers. This once again confirms the idea that on his famous map he first of all depicted a magnetic mountain attracting a compass needle, and not the mythical Measure - “the universal mountain of the ancestors of Indo-European peoples”, no matter how much we would like it.
A. Leontiev